Sci-fi Short: Jump Start - Part 2

That evening, like any other evening Pullman left the office at 7.30 he had declined Steve Nixon’s invite to go and drink at Swale’s. The fashionable bar would be teeming with Cybertec execs and the last thing he wanted to do was hang out with anyone from the company, especially tonight.

He walked home not wanting to interact with anyone beyond a vague nod of recognition as he passed them in the street. The sky was cold and black tinged with the reflected green and amber lights bouncing off the wet streets. The intense light pollution thrown up by the Central Restricted Zone making it impossible to view the stars.

The cold winter air tugged at his old coat forcing it to wrap itself around his skeleton like a second skin, his fingers closed around the object in his pocket.

He could get in a lot of trouble for sneaking it out of Cybertec, but he supposed he could get in a hell of a lot more trouble if anyone found out what he was going to do with it before or after he managed to put it back.

Pullman’s apartment was just north of Camden Town, it used to be part of the Central Restricted Zone but then someone or something had decided that it wasn’t fashionable enough so the area now inhabited the Northern Derestricted Zone.

Pullman had once seen pictures of what the area looked like a hundred years ago, nothing much had changed. Instead of high rise pre fabricated houses, there were now low rise prefabricated dwellings made of foam-injected carboplas instead of concrete. Holographic play areas where there used to be swings and roundabouts.

Pullman walked through his estate with his usual don’t-fuck-with-me walk, his eyes taking in every movement, every potential threat; tonight of all nights was not the night to get mugged.

Pullman lived on the third of five floors in his dwelling, he got into the magno-lift and wrinkled his nose as the sharp amonia smell of urine assaulted his olfactory glands. He wondered if the people that had lived here in those pictures he saw were as disrespectful to their own living environment as the scum that called themselves his neighbours.

Once inside Pullman fished the object he’d borrowed from work out of his pocket, he set it down on the table and stared at it for a while.

It was a small grey rectangular box a tad smaller than his hand, this one just like any other one he’d ever seen was a brushed steel colour.

The three amber lights at the top end of the box told him that the Quarks-Roberts keyboard running down the length of its right side was inactive yet ready to use.

Pullman fished in his other pocket and pulled a small black pouch from it, he emptied the contents onto the table next to the box. He wondered not for the first time at how amazing it was that you could fit an entire human consciousness onto one of these tiny chips.

He’d stolen five of them, the chips weren’t that high security but if the information that he’d discovered ever got out into the general populace then the movements of chips like these would be extremely restricted.

Pullman removed his coat and picked up the small box and ran his fingers down the right hand side, tapping them to the rhythm of the code he’d memorised. The lights on the box signalled their response by flashing green at him as the box emitted a barely audible hum.

Pullman set the box back down on his desk, it reminded him of a holo that he had seen of an old Japanese puzzle box. The box had been made entirely of wood and Pullman had been fascinated how the original makers had managed to manufacture an object with such precision by only using wood.

He was fascinated full stop, at the fact that wood had been used to build anything beyond the late to mid 20th century, it seemed almost pathological to him. Surely there were better materials to use? But humans had ignored those materials and had even used wood, in part, to build their houses right up to the mid 21st century.

Pullman watched as various sections of the little grey box lifted and folded open to reveal a small lozenge shaped cavity, finely filigreed with faint grey lines. He picked up one of the smooth black chips and placed it into the space that was barely bigger than the chip itself.

The box recognised the chip signature and automatically closed itself. Pullman barely noticed his heart start to beat faster, as he picked up the box and carried it over to his terminal in the corner of the room.

He had spent the last few weeks modifying his computer with the equipment he would need. He set the box down and tapped out another memorised code on the Q-R keyboard, this time the box folded open in a different way, revealing a small universal socket.

Pullman picked up one of the cables protruding from his terminal and plugged it into the box, all his attention was on the screen as he ran the illegal software. His terminal bathed his face in a cool flickering of electric light as streams of data slid across the flat screen, he held his breath as the software attempted to link itself to the hardware. Finally the words he’d been waiting for sprung up on screen

~ ACCESS COMPLETE ~.

Pullman let out the breath that he hadn’t even realised he'd been holding, he was still nervous. This didn’t mean it was going to work it merely meant that the software had accessed his box.

‘Now for the illegal part’ he thought; he picked up the headband connected to his terminal and put it on, he felt a slight tingling as the band activated.

~ MELD PROCESS INITIALISING ~

It was working, once more his pupils dilated and constricted in time with the on screen data spewing forth.

~ PROCESS COMPLETE FULL COPY ESTABLISHED: EDIT? ~

Pullman could hardly believe it had been that easy, he had managed to make a copy of his consciousness chip, he worked away for another three hours, making four more copies and editing the information contained on each chip.

When he finished he examined the five chips in the palm of his hand, each of them copies of him that had been carefully edited. Even though his terminal told him that the copies were successful, he wouldn’t know for sure till he uploaded them into blank clones and for that he would need Henry Fango CEO and owner of Bio Screen Fabricated Technologies or FabTech for short.

Pullman stared at the five chips in the palm of his hand and wondered if he should pull out now before doing anything detectably illegal.

He knew that he was asking a question that he'd already answered, there was no pulling back from the brink now.

He fed the private access codes into his terminal and placed a call to Fango's private phone.

"Into the lion's den I go."

Title image: Brian Kostiuk on Unsplash

Cryptogee
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